Only you know how brave you are.

Whenever it gets hard – really hard – I remember how even worse it was. And I am not simply talking about the physical symptoms, I am also talking about the bottomless pit of destructive emotions hiding behind them.

Some 12 years ago, the distress got such that I realized I no longer had a choice. I could not continue relying on traditional approaches to life. They did not care that I was walking beside myself, constellated in a thousand energy bodies. Floating. A ghost. Or worse: a robot, rejecting every unordinary physical and emotional symptom that popped up, reasoning with myself, controlling and repressing, using all my willpower to fit into the social mold and appear more normal than normal. I needed to find a way of giving myself space, of somehow freeing myself from the weight, the entrapment.

When I started looking for solutions, I had no idea where I was headed. Like many people my generation in the West, my upbringing is anchored in rationalism and pragmatism. Going down an a-typical path was scary. So, I started small – with socially-accepted changes, like eating better, practicing yoga and going to the kinesiologist. You know the saying:

Follow you heart, but take your brain with you.

Over the years that followed, as I grew both more acquainted with the relationship between the body, the mind and the emotions, I got the nerve to try out newer, more exotic therapies and medicines. That is when I started seeing the logical patterns in the work, anticipating better how the therapies would affect me, what psycho-emotional processes I could expect after a session.

Yet, even today, no matter how prepared I think I am, I can still get caught in the intensity of the emotions and insights that come to light. I freak out, overwhelmed, incredulous, wondering what the hell is happening to me. Am I going mad? Then, I wonder what I got myself into.

Whenever it gets like that and I doubt the road I am traveling, I turn to my favorite books, documentaries and more importantly, I talk to people on a similar path as mine. One of the upsides of going on an adventure inside your soul is definitely the people you meet along the way, people you can relate to. But sometimes, it is just not enough: the experiences and explanations there are never exactly mine, they might describe a different stage of development, a different way of coping or a different approach altogether…

At the end of the day, the only one who can really understand you and take care of you is you.

That is when I look back. To how bad it really was. I think back to when I was only beginning to clean my energy, when I was only starting to integrate the rejected bits of my being: how awful I was feeling, how afraid of everything, how uncomfortable in my body. And I congratulate myself. I remember some of the painful details. And I congratulate myself again. And again. Until whatever difficult, heavy, hard-to-believe realization I was closing in on become easier to accept.

Each existence is one’s own, of course, each journey is different. But how I see it, you have two choices. Either you continue fighting the way you have been told, always going for more and eventually coming to terms with the fact that every battle will only lead to more war. Or you can start picking a different set of battles altogether, and eventually see the proof that you are winning ground. In both cases, you have no idea where you are headed or when the war will be over – if ever. But in the second, at least, the fight makes more sense.